NEW WORK

THE IMPLICATION’S OF BARING ONE’S TEETH painting series 2018:

Le Corbusier Chaise Lounge

I’m literally cutting and pasting gender and race onto a modernist design classic by the architect Le Corbusier who defined his furniture as docile servants, “discreet and self-effacing in order to leave his master free.”

The painting is a Frankenstein with bodies and color mismatched, a being considered less than standard, or human. We rip each other apart and try to put back the pieces.

The Implication’s of Baring One’s Teeth

Facial expressions of fear and anger are social signals frequently presumed to signify threat to perceivers. Stereotypes of race are based on fear and anger.

The Wide Sargasso Sea

The name, The Wide Sargasso Sea, comes from Jean Rhy’s novel- a feminist anti-colonial response to Jane Eyre. The crazy woman in the attic literally uses the masters tools to burn down his house.

Pregnant Woman 3X

The woman in this painting and I were both very pregnant with the exact same due date at the time. I made this piece thinking about how a woman’s pregnant body can be present but invisible and how the color of that body and it’s surroundings affect her visibility

Installation view, "Montage of Heck"

M.David & Co. Gallery

Corbusier Chaise Lounge

60” x 168” oil on canvas 2018

The Implications of Baring One's Teeth

80” x 60”, oil on canvas 2018

The Wide Sargasso Sea, 1

oil on canvas 84 x 60inches 2018

The Wide Sargasso Sea, 2

oil on canvas 60 x 84inches 2018

Pregnant Woman 3X

60” x 108”, mixed media on paper, 2018

Eve as Snake

36” x 72”, oil on linen, 2017

Naked Bike Project (2015-18)

The Naked Bike Project portrays, through images of an amazing group of women riders, the shift in our culture about power and self determination happening now.

There’s a rich history of women’s bodies, nude and clothed, portrayed in art. Much of this historical portrayal has ranged from the casually misogynistic to outright sexism. After a still ongoing struggle for awareness and rights, many women are now controlling, owning and celebrating the narrative of their bodies.

Naked Bike is a performance of that narrative, the language and agency of a woman’s body combined with a machine traditionally associated not just with men, but sexuality, rebellion and freedom.

The motorcycles portrayed cease to be mere moving vehicles but become a symbol and extension of contemporary female sensuality. It’s curves echoing the form of the body, the motorcycle functions as a lover, a prop, a site for the expression of utter physicality. The female bikers who have volunteered for the project share a love of riding and a willingness to be vulnerable for an idea: re-imagining the portrayal of their bodies in combination with their beloved machines. The images of Naked Bike are as diverse as the individuals being portrayed.

Women riders and machine can be one—cyborgs rejecting the boundaries and social mores that separate human from machine. In some pictures the women are covered in gear for the sport, but also can function here as armor, a mysterious shell, a hidden space. In others, that protective layer is gone. Naked, the women project what protects them, or not, as female.

My work isn’t about documenting the visibility of the growing number of female riders, but a change in the very culture we’re in. This is not just about/for women, this freedom of thought is for everyone.

The Naked Bike Project is about the journey, the beginning of a provocative and culture-shifting ride.

The Pandora's BoxX Project (2018-ongoing)

The Pandora’s BoxX Project is an ongoing series portraying women artists, curators, collectors, gallerists, and critics at the forefront of a cultural shift about power and self determination.

The project spans seven generations of women to date, from established artists to women who are just starting out on their practices. The photographs document a singular moment in time between the artists that emerged in the sixties and seventies without much communication or support from the art world, to the emergence of subsequent generations of artists coinciding with the rise of a female support system and use of social media.

Pandora’s BoxX, which will become a book and an exhibition, addresses the gender imbalance of women in the arts, while acknowledging and celebrating the growing representation of women artists today. It’s an idea that encompasses community engagement and an ongoing dialogue about art, ideas and social change.

The photo sessions, shots of faces and hands in available light are intentionally brief; the streamlined structure of the shoots is akin to a still version of Cinema Verite. The use of artist’s hands in my photos is crucial for activating the space between myself and my subject revealing something about the work they create and lives lived.

Pat Steir

painter

Uncanny Lady M (2014)

With my series of large-scale photographs and paintings titled ‘The Uncanny Lady M’, I’ve combined a science fiction landscape with a revisionist narrative for the significant, exciting leading ladies who enter a storyline only to be become the main male character’s trophy, quietly ushered off stage when no longer needed.

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, the leading lady of ‘Macbeth’, whose gender thwarts the ferocity of her ambitions, mouths ”Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here…” in Act I, Scene 5. By Act 5, she’s sleepwalking out of the story.

Lady Macbeth’s story was desperately ripe for revision, so I re-imagined her as a cyborg queen, a post-human machine without the constraints of morality, class, race or gender. Pre-production involved sculpting face and body coverings, abstracted ‘crowns’ for Lady M’s queen takeover. Fashioned from skin pricking wire mesh, mylar and plastic tubing, all of which serve to enhance, obscure and, at times restrain the body in provocative ways.

For the initial photo shoot, I asked invited women to imagine themselves as the badass beauty wearing only the sculpted crown and to interact with a distorted image of themselves formulated via a sheet of reflective mylar.

Ultimately, the individual performer’s sense of identity merges with the physical parameters of the set. The actual woman and her misrepresentation become one. Disquieting beauties of pain and pleasure, these women are fiercely themselves, becoming the elements in a non-verbal alphabet within the poetry of the re-imagined body.

ULM Me 1

archival pigment print, 72x49 in.

2014

ULM Body Comp

archival pigment print, 42x84 in.

2014

ULM M. 2

archival pigment print, 50x72 in.

2014

ULM M. 3

archival pigment print, 72x47 in.

2014

ULM Marcia

archival pigment print, 30x44 in.

2014

ULM M. 5

archival pigment print, 60x50 in.

2014

ULM Marygrace

archival pigment print, 50x36 in.

2014

ULM Maike

archival pigment print, 30x20 in.

2014

ULM Myriam

archival pigment print, 45x30 in.

2014

ULM M 4

archival pigment print 48x72 in

ULM Marta

archival pigment print 54 x 36 inches 2014

Uncanny Lady M, 1

oil on canvas 60 x 84 inches 2014

Uncanny Lady M, 2

oil on canvas 84 x 60 inches, 2014

STUDIO INSTALLATION

Masks used in Uncanny Lady M

Poetry of the Nonhuman (1986-2018)

I began my ‘performative experiments’—playing with the language of the female body—in the mid-eighties, the beginning of my serious studio practice. The photographs I took of myself and close friends began as reference studies for paintings and evolved to simply being the work itself. The use of various props and body paint play with identities- gender, race and what it is to be human.

Our Marvelous Punishment 2

archival ink on acid free paper 40x30 in.

2012

Self Portrait with Wig Hair From The Beauty Supply #2

archival pigment print, 1995

Self Portrait with Wig Hair From The Beauty Supply #1

archival pigment print 1995

Heavenly Headress

archival pigment print 2013

Eve as Snake

archival pigment print 1994

Poetry of The Non-Human 1 (Collage)

archival ink on acid free paper, 60 x 40 inches

2013

Our Marvelous Punishment 5

archival ink on acid free paper 40x30 in.

2012

Our Marvelous Punishment 6

archival ink on acid free paper 40x30 in.

2012

Our Marvelous Punishment_3

archival ink on acid free paper 40x30 in.

2012

Our Marvelous Punishment 4

archival ink on acid free paper 40x35 in.

2012

Poetry of The Non-Human 7

archival ink on acid free paper, 60 x 40 inches

2013

Is The Room (2013)

In 2013 I was asked by Debra DiBlasi of Jaded Ibis Press to make a visual interpretation of Rosetta Ballew Jenkin’ first published book of poems, “IS THE ROOM”.

In Rosetta's poem 'As if she were something opened', there is a sentence "she lines the walls with herself". The 'she' "Is The Room". The walls are the space between her unconscious mind and hard edge reality. Her perceived acts, relationships, her life's past, present and future are now projected onto the walls of this one dream room.

I am exploring that metaphor of 'the wall' or the space between the 'realness' of our subconscious and what can be the subjective fantasies of reality. In giving visual form to this idea, I invited a group of friends to my studio for a portrait session--not of themselves, but a portrait/performance of the space surrounding them, the outline that defines their relationships to themselves, each other, and to myself as recorder.